Radhika Nagpal is the Norman Augustine Professor at Princeton University, joint between the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science, where she leads the Self-organizing Swarms and Robotics Group (SSR).  Nagpal is a leading researcher in swarm robotics, bio-inspired algorithms, and self-organized collective intelligence. Projects from her lab include bio-inspired multi-robot systems such as the Kilobot thousand-robot swarm (Science 2014), the Termes robots for collective construction (Science 2014), and the Blueswarm underwater robots (Science Robotics 2021), as well as models of biological collective intelligence in ants and cells (Nature Communications 2022). In 2017 Nagpal co-founded ROOT Robotics, an educational robotics company aimed at broadening participation AI and robotics through early education, acquired by Robot. Nagpal is also known for her Scientific American blog article (“The Awesomest 7 Year Postdoc”, 2013) advocating academic cultural change and received the Anita Borg Early Career Award (2010) and McDonald Mentoring Award (2015) for her diversity-equity work. Nagpal is an ACM Fellow and AAAI Fellow (2020), and was an invited TED speaker in 2017. Nagpal was named by Nature magazine as one of the top ten influential scientists and engineers of the year (Nature10 award, Dec 2014).

Prior to joining Princeton, Nagpal was the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard (2004-2021), a founding core faculty in the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and an Amazon Scholar (2020-2021). Nagpal received her PhD and SM/SB degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT 2001, 1994/93) and was a Research Fellow in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School (2003).

At Princeton, Nagpal is the faculty advisor for the Princeton Chapter of NSBE (National Society of Black Engineers) and serves on the leadership board of the Black-in-Robotics Boston Chapter.